COOLER HEADS PREVAILED IN PRIMARY CASE

Michele JacklinTHE HARTFORD COURANT

So much for judicial temperament. U.S. District Judge Peter C. Dorsey lost his cool and paid the consequences.

Like a parent who grounds his teenager for not taking out the garbage that very instant, Dorsey worked himself into a lather over what he perceived to be state legislators' foot-dragging in rewriting Connecticut's election laws.

Dorsey wanted the legislature to snap to attention and act immediately. Uh, sorry, judge, but the General Assembly doesn't work that way. There's a reason why it's called a deliberative body. It's deliberative.

Also, the news apparently hadn't reached Dorsey that Connecticut is in the midst of a full-blown fiscal crisis. The governor's aides and legislative leaders have been otherwise engaged in recent weeks, trying to muster the votes to enact a budget that's $200 million out of balance, while taking great pains to conceal that fact. Carrying off a budget deception of that magnitude is grueling, time-consuming work.

But more on that in Sunday's column. Back to Judge Dorsey.

In his first ruling, on July 23, he rightly criticized the state's ultra-restrictive nominating system. He said the law that requires candidates to obtain 15 percent of the convention delegates to qualify for a primary is unduly burdensome and probably unconstitutional. But he declined to place the plaintiffs' names on the Sept. 10 ballot, instead directing the legislature to correct the problem.

The judge said he was giving "the Connecticut legislature a window of opportunity to minimize any political disruption by fashioning a permanent solution or an interim solution for just the 2002 race." Later, in the same ruling, he said the court "would not supplant the legislative judgment with its own."

Federal judges obviously reserve the right to change their minds. A mere two weeks later, Dorsey turned Connecticut's political world on its head. He scolded legislative leaders for saying they would not address the matter until the next regularly scheduled session in January 2003 (an altogether reasonable approach to take). He also directed that the names of plaintiffs Edwin Gomes and Jim Campbell be placed on the Sept. 10 ballot.

And here's where it got silly. He ordered that anyone who knew the address of the secretary of the state's office, could sign his name, belonged to a political party and who had lived in Connecticut longer than it took to drive to Hartford could run for office.

That opened the floodgates, relatively speaking. Senate President Pro Tem Kevin B. Sullivan quipped that running for higher office had become more popular than washing one's car on a hot August day. That wasn't far from the truth.

By Friday, two dozen people had offered themselves as guinea pigs in the judge's grand experiment, including a gubernatorial aspirant who thought he was a Republican but discovered he's a Democrat; an unemployed construction worker; a gentleman who decided that any office would do, so he filed for three; a Hartford Courant columnist and a partridge in a pear tree.

Dorsey had turned that most sacred of democratic institutions, our elections, into a three-ring circus. And in doing so, he invited the three judges on the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn his ruling. They did, unanimously, and within eight minutes of the legal arguments being heard.

They based their ruling on what some might call a technicality -- that Dorsey had overstepped his authority in amending his July 23 decision once it was appealed by the state. But they also said the state's two major political parties should have been defendants in the lawsuit because their rules mirror state law in establishing a 15-percent delegate threshold.

Dorsey had said the party rules were not germane because political parties don't have "a First Amendment right to exclusively determine who appears on their primary ballot." That point will be debated further when the lawsuit is argued before Dorsey on Aug. 28 in federal court in New Haven. By the time the trial is over, the ruling will come too late to affect the Sept. 10 primary.

Legislative leaders have pledged to address the problem, in a thoughtful and holistic manner, in January when the General Assembly convenes. That's how it should be done.